Filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor Emilio Fernandez, nicknamed “El Indio,” fled Mexico for Los Angeles in the 1920s, exiled after supporting a failed revolutionary uprising led by Adolfo de la Huerta.

Working in Hollywood, Fernandez befriended Mexican actress Dolores del Rio, then wife of studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s art director and Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences member Cedric Gibbons. Del Rio introduced Fernandez to Gibbons, who was in charge of supervising the statuette’s design.

Most people are well aware that “white noise” is the common term for a background haze of sound that blots out something else. For speed, I’ll quote wiki: “The term white noise, the ‘sh’ noise produced by a signal containing all audible frequencies of vibration, is sometimes used as slang (or a neologism) to describe a meaningless commotion or chatter that masks or obliterates underlying information.”